Doing the Work 02/17/25
Calls for submissions, reading recommendations, writing prompts 02/17/25
Hello friends!
Welcome to the tenth installment of our Doing The Work series. Here, we share opportunities for submitting your work, recommend some great reads, and offer creative exercises for you to try.
In this week's edition:
Calls for Submissions: Opportunities for poets, prose writers, and artists.
Reading Recommendations: A selection of writing I've been enjoying recently.
Creative Prompts: Writing exercises to inspire your creativity.
If you find this post helpful, please share it with your friends and family. Enjoy!
Calls for Submission
Some big time, big reputation journals open in in February. Today we’re going to highlight the international journal Southword. Normally, we try to focus on approachable journals for all artists, but this is such a good opportunity for any of our fiction writers out there!
P.S. You will need a Submittable account, and for past and future posts we recommend making one. It is free to make, and I’d highly suggest doing it if you want to start trying to publish work, since many journals use them.
Reading Recommendations
This week I’m going to stick alongside the fiction theme of things. Southword has published writers of renown in the past, one of which is (personal favorite of mine) Huruki Murakami. Yes, that Murakami!
So this week’s reading recommendation is Murakami’s short story Town of Cats. I hope you will find it inspiring and aspiring as well! You can read his short stories at various places on the internet, so if you like what you read here, you can always find some more!
Writing Prompts
I was just reading Anne Carson’s book Plainwater, an amazing book of writing of poetry and prose. In one section, she has a series of prose poems that have titles like On Shadows, On Sculpture, On Camille Claudel, etc.
Essentially, this week’s prompt is to write a poem, or short story, or really anything at all, about only one subject. Dig deep! You’ll be surprised at what you can come up with. The more specific subject the better!
We love writing prompts so much we wrote an entire book of them. Check out the book in its entirety!
Thank You & Good Luck
If you found this useful, check out last Monday’s post.
To support our work, please share this post with a friend and subscribe.
Thanks for reading,
Sam & Corey.
Legends!